Captain Kaon

If cult classics like Gravitar, Sub-Terrania, Solar Jetman and Thrust tickle your fancy in any way, shape or form, the gameplay and mission structure of Captain Kaon will be right up your alley. I, for one, love these exploratory thrust physics shooters where the objective is as much about piloting safely through twisting caverns with cargo dangling precariously from your ship as it is engaging with hostiles. Captain Kaon features satisfying twin stick shooting, doing away with a particular oldschool restriction where fixed aiming meant pointing your spacecraft squarely at your target -- not the simplest of tasks in cramped quarters with gravity's perpetual pull! It's a welcome, distinctly action-oriented modernization of the retro formula that Captain Kaon riffs on and, paired with frequent directions provided during any given mission, it makes the game far more accessible than its forebears. A non-linear campaign, an arsenal that grows progressively larger with completed missions, customizable loadouts that let you pick and choose your primary/secondary weapons plus a variety of ships to unlock all work to fill out the package quite nicely. This was a day one purchase for me and I'm looking forward to playing (and inevitably replaying) the full set of Ceres missions! :) On the Early Access front, my experience with the game included its fair share of bugs, rough edges and weirdness but nothing unpatchable. Captain Kaon, as of today, has been fully released but there's still a bit of iffiness with regard to controller support. Anyone hoping to use a favourite non-X360 gamepad would be well advised to run a controller emulator like x360ce as generic USB controllers, such as a Logitech Dual Action, aren't supported. Things get a little bit trickier then that, though, as it's possible to switch control priority over from mouse/keyboard to gamepad even while an unsupported generic USB controller is connected (suggesting that the gamepad [i]is[/i] detected), causing the mouse pointer to vanish and leaving no means to navigate the menu or revert to mouse/keyboard. This borked setting saves between sessions and it's only after a certain amount of blind clicking around that the game switches back to mouse/keyboard at the title menu. With all that out of the way, I'm happy to report that Captain Kaon plays really rather well with an Xbox 360 controller, although certain menus such as mission selection and loadout adjustment feel a bit clunky in their implementation. Configuration is quite spartan at present, with display options providing a choice of windowed 1280x720 or scaled fullscreen, audio options nowhere to be found and no freedom to rebind controls. Default bindings are perfectly sensible for QWERTY keyboard users, though. Nothing technical-wise here is a dealbreaker for me, but I must admit that the controller issues described above made for a bit of a rocky start. This is a super cool game and I [b]strongly[/b] recommend checking it out if you're craving something thrust-y.

My son created this game and I bought it for his nephew , my grandson has found it challenging and enjoyed the graphics and will play it again next time he visits.

I am writing this not to talk about the game's positives, but about its negatives, which are far more obvious and significant when playing. The game is divided into two campaigns, Ceres, the one you start on, and Mars. Each campaign is divided into sectors, and you must defeat each sector, which is one map. You control a small vessel and fly it in a side-on view. You can rotate and thrust your ship, and pick up and drop certain items. Your gun can fire in any direction, controlled by the mouse, and you have three secondary rockets or bombs. You have a mission, which varies each map: it might be to pick up a Marine APC from your ship and drop it in a certain location, or destroy three enemy targets, and so on. There are gun turrets which open and fire at you, pods that fire at you and are released from buildings, doors or shields that block progress, and sometimes you need to land on one platform to get a battery that you pick up and take to a socket. Nothing too complicated. As you complete each sector it brings you closer to completing the campaign. It also earns 'fleet resources', which you can use to automatically win a sector, or to build improved weapons or ships. These are lost when you die though (you have three lives in a mission). So the gameplay is fairly simple and not very interesting, as are the graphics. Those in a sector are adequate, definitely looking like an earlier era, while the animated sequences, introducing the story, are just bad. Gameplay can be frustrating, since on harder missions you get swarmed by enemies, which cluster around you making it difficult to aim accurately or even move. Since they keep spawning from their silos it can be difficult to even reach the silos to destroy them. A lot of the achievements give you no idea what to do to achieve them, which is a major failing. Plus the bugs affect the achievements. I gained an achievement before I even started playing, and didn't get one for completing the Ceres campaign without failing a mission. [h1]The Bugs, the bugs[/h1] You can fly through certain scenery. You can see an indicator of where your ship is, but you can't see which way it is facing, which is crucial. Unless you immediately spin the ship around and thrust back out, there is a good chance you will get stuck somewhere 'behind' the level, fruitlessly spinning and thrusting, trying to get the ship moving towards open space again. And the big one, the really big one is: you can't play the Mars campaign. You can start it certainly, but as soon as you try to start the first mission the game crashes back to the desktop. This is such an utterly obvious problem that I cannot see how the developer did not fix it. He isn't around any more to do anything about it. So for these reasons, this is very much a [b]thumbs-down[/b] to the game.

Good fun retro game. Looks like it should have been released on the SNES, like Thrust crossed with an old Japanese shoot em up, and just as much fun to play.

Retro style with solid controls, easy to get stuck into a 'one more level' loop.

A good game that introduce modern elements to classic arcade gameplay. Easy controls that works great for both keyboard+mouse and twin-stick gamepad.

Captain Kaon is a great homage to the original Thrust on the Commodore 64. I played the original game as a kid and remember it fondly. This is a great tribute and a lot of fun. Highly recommended!

Enjoyable but challenging fun retro blast. Worth a go if you enjoyed the Amiga/Dos games of the past.

Great retro shooter, very satifying controls, thumbs up!

Solar Jetwoman